News 

Click here for five reasons why Ballmer-Bot would be better than Ballmer

Gates was delivering a farewell speech to Microsoft's Tech Ed conference in Orlando. And the outgoing chairman said the company is on track to deliver a new test version of IE8 this summer.

"We're hard at work on a new version of that, so-called IE8, a very creative name that we've come up with," Gates quipped. "And you're going to see the beta for this coming out in August of this year. Actually, that's Beta 2," said Gates correcting himself, although he failed to reveal any new features for the browser that haven't already been seen in the first beta.

Microsoft also revealed that a second beta of Silverlight 2 will be released by the end of this week. The company demonstrated a new

ADVERTISEMENT

Silverlight social networking application called Crossfade, that creates a moving "conveyor belt" of music, video and pictures.

"There are a bunch of what I call interactive tiles that go back and forth on the screen," explained Microsoft's Soma Somasegar, who demonstrated the app with Bill Gates. "And through one click you can control the movement of the tiles, you can change the direction the belt moves, and let's say there is a particular tile that catches your attention, say in this case I'm going to click on this video file. It right away centers on the screen, and the video starts playing."

Microsoft says Crossfade will allow people to share content with friends on social networks, and also allow them to search your media library with the embedded meta data.

The Ballmer Bot

However, the star of the show was the Ballmer Bot - a frankly horrifying robot with an LCD screen bearing the head of Microsoft's boisterous CEO, which entered the stage bleeting the Ballmer mantra "developers, developers, developers."

In a nice sideswipe at Ballmer's recent encounter with a Hungarian student, the robot started launching eggs across the stage.

As a parting gift, the robot handed Gates an envelope. "This guy is pretty dexterous. I think he's handing that to me. Let me take a look," said Gates. "It could be a message of some type. No, goodness, it's my Xbox Live lifetime subscription. Steve is so generous."

We assume that last comment was ironic. Then again, he was prepared to give Yahoo $40 billion...